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New project - Chapter 2

Because I'm having so much fun writing this thing right now, here's Chapter 2. Chapter 1 can be found here.

I still don't have a good title for it, but it's up to 11,000 words now, which isn't bad. It's going to be critiqued on Tuesday by my writing group, so I'm sure I'll have lots of changes after that. Still, sometimes it's interesting to see the raw product, pre-edit, and watch it progress to its final form. I have no problem sharing that process with you.

2.

Back
at his apartment, Geoff put his keys down on the breakfast bar,
shrugged off his blazer and threw it over a side chair in the living
room, and then pulled a beer out of the fridge and guzzled it. The
Valium...er, aspirin, well, ok, the placebo effect, was wearing off,
and Geoff's hands were shaking a little.

The
offer from Symon Brooks was absurd. Echelon wasn't ready for prime
time. It was just a jumble of code, and a website he'd hacked
together to test a small fraction of its capabilities.

And
the name wasn't stupid, dammit. It was edgy, techie, nerdy,
intelligent. Geoff wasn't entirely certain what the word meant
exactly, but he had a vague idea that it had something to do with
military formations. Echelon was about organizing data. Regimenting
data. It was Geoff's attempt to order, to filter, to make some sense
out of an external kind of chaos that mirrored the fractured,
half-remembered, unfocused, unending stream of input that assaulted
his mind every day.

Geoff
gestured at the breakfast bar, and his Air Screen clicked on, the
thin projectors built into the ceiling and the bar glowing as they
wrangled photons into aetheric submission, filling the space between
them with floating data. The image was distorted where he'd put his
keys down, so he picked them up again and threw them somewhere else.

The
Air Screen installation had been expensive and complicated, a stupid
indulgence, really, but Geoff liked the “living in the future”
aspect of it. He didn't use it as his primary tech device; the
gesture-based interface wasn't intuitive enough for his taste, and
the thing was, frankly, buggy as hell. Still, it was gadgety and fun
to mess around with, and there were some great games on it.

He
swiped over to look at his email inbox. Brooks hadn't sent him the
contract yet. He scrolled through the endless morass of spam,
catalogues, and mailing lists he kept getting himself on even though
he kept hitting unsubscribe on every single one of them. Email had
been in wide use for more than half a century, and he was still
inundated with crap.

Sure,
he could try using one of those organizational bots that promised to
clean up his inbox and only show him the important stuff, but he knew
enough from his experiments with Echelon that those kinds of
algorithms could miss stuff. And he didn't want to miss something
important. And he couldn't be bothered. It was fine. He had five
million emails in his inbox, of which he'd read maybe a few hundred
over the past ten years. That was how it was. His friends laughed
at him, with their empty inboxes and neat and tidy e-lives, but he
just shrugged it off. It was easier to leave an email in a place
than to figure out where it should actually go.

Which
was entirely the point of Echelon, really.

Combining
Echelon with AI would make it infinitely powerful. Kind of a scary
thought, but Geoff wasn't one of those doomsayers who was afraid of
the latest advances in AI because it might lead to killer robots and
the end of the world. It hadn't so far.

Still,
Geoff wondered if it should be his
mind that was uploaded into the thing. Geoff honestly worried that
an AI based on his brain would spend its time bouncing from subject
to subject, distracted and consumed with wonder at every new bit and
byte of data but unable to absorb anything in particular, and find
itself completely unable to handle the task of sorting the data it
was asked to sort. Instead of regimenting the internet, an AI based
on his mind might just make it worse.

Geoff
knew his own limitations, spelled out in a four-letter diagnosis that
had dogged him all his life. ADHD. An AI based on him wouldn't turn
into an evil robot overlord. It wouldn't be able to stay focused long
enough to figure out the first step to world control. It'd start
hacking into a military database and then get distracted by a video
file of cats yawning.

But
maybe Symon Brooks could edit the ADHD out of Geoff's digital mind,
take only the good stuff, and Geoff could see his e-self as an
idealized, digital version of the person he should have been all his
life, if only there weren't so many damned squirrels and doorknobs
and shiny shiny baubles.

Geoff
walked out of his kitchen and into his living room. He finished his
beer and put the empty bottle down on a side table, where it shared
space with two half-full water glasses, a small plate with sandwich
crusts on it from two days ago, a book he'd been meaning to finish
but hadn't, a tablet computer with a dead battery, a new battery for
a different tablet computer that he didn't have anymore, two chargers
for phones he wasn't using, and a pack of gum.

His
Siamese cat announced herself by meowing a hello and then leaping up
onto the back of his vinyl couch and walking across it toward him.
She headbutted his hand as he passed, and he gave her a few
absentminded pets. Her food bowl was empty, so he filled it, and
gave her some clean water.

Geoff
grabbed his Baton of his coffee table. Inactive, it looked like its
namesake – a black, plastic stick about the size and circumference
of a cigar. But when Geoff registered his fingerprint on a panel on
one side of the Baton, it split open, and a flexiglass screen
unrolled itself from within.

As
usual, in grabbing his Baton, he nearly knocked over two empty beer
bottles and a martini glass. He really should clean up the place,
but bah.

He
sat down on his couch and swiped open his social networks. One of
his friends had posted a picture of a cat. Another of his friends
was eating a sandwich. A third friend was feeding a sandwich to a
cat. A fourth friend was very angry about something, and there was a
whole long heated argument that had Godwined within twelve comments.
Someone else had posted something from a website Geoff knew was full
of inaccuracies but was relied on unquestioningly by people who
adhered to the No Pepper diet/lifestyle/religion. Someone had posted
a comment to the No Pepper post with a link to an actual well-sourced
news article disproving the original article, and the original poster
had been quick to question the credibility of the news article,
claiming that the pro-No Pepper website had “done the research”
and that was all the original poster needed to know. Another friend
wanted him to try a new VR game that was free at first but required
periodic payments to actually advance.

And
so on and so forth.

All
of these tech devices, and it's still all just cats, inane arguments,
and porn, isn't it?
Geoff sighed and swiped upwards on the Baton. It rolled itself back
up.

Geoff
realized he didn't know what time it was, or whether he needed to get
ready for his date. He opened his Baton again and was immediately
drawn into a web article about a new way to clean your dishes using
only air, and then spent another ten minutes scrolling through a
forum of people interested in antique scooters, and then was curious
about whether there were any old scooters for sale nearby, and then
was curious about the difference between four stroke and two stroke
scooters, and then saw an ad for a new bar nearby and clicked on
that. After a little while he closed the scroll again.

Geoff
realized he still didn't know what time it was, even though he now
remembered that he'd opened his Baton specifically to look at that.
He opened it back up and looked at the clock.

It
was 6:30, and he had to be at the restaurant in 30 minutes. Shit.
He realized he didn't have time to change, but he figured the
corduroy blazer he'd worn to the interview would be fine, right?

Only
the cat was now sleeping on it. Damn.
He ran to his bedroom and rummaged through his closet. He sniffed
the underarms of the shirt he was wearing. He was fine there, and
the shirt looked good, it was just sort of a boring and corporate
button-down. Not exactly date wear. He needed to accessorize a
little bit.

He
realized that most of his clothes weren't in his closet; they were in
various piles of clean laundry heaped around his bedroom. He was
good about doing laundry.
He just wasn't great about putting it away.

So
everything was wrinkled and unwearable, and much of it was also
covered in cat hair.

He
decided to keep the shirt and black slacks he was wearing, just add
his black leather motorcycle jacket to the mix, and call it good. He
also put on a hat. Then he took off the hat. He thought about the
hat. He found a different hat. Then he thought he might wear a
scarf instead. He wondered if he could take this scarf and use it as
kind of an ascot. No. He decided to forget the scarf and the hat.
He rummaged around wildly for his keys, found them, patted himself
down, realized he didn't have his phone wallet, scrambled around
until he found that, opened the door of his apartment, looked down,
and realized he was barefoot. He put his keys down, rummaged around
for his boots and a clean pair of socks, managed that, and then spent
another chunk of time trying to find his keys again.

With
six minutes until his date was to arrive at a restaurant that would
take him twenty minutes to drive to, Geoff finally had everything.
He took a deep breath and walked out of his apartment.